On black Friday, I got up at 4:45 AM and met my 12 year old son in the dark hallway of a house in Medford Oregon. 30 minutes later we were bleary-eyed and 5th in line at the local EB Games store waiting to spend my son's nest egg on the new Nintendo Wii (pronounced "we") game console. As I was standing there with other parents and their kids I couldn't help but think that we were all there to buy a machine that would be a divider between the generations. The irony of taking an unusual effort to buy one more anti-social escape mechanism was not lost on me. I was feeling a bit helpless that this new Wii, which my son saved his money for since last spring was destined to produce more couch-plated vegetating inactivity and increasing his risk of future blobdom.
Oops, wrong! I never thought I would be blogging favorably about a game console, but here it is. The Nintendo Wii is an extremely creative machine. While not as thrilling as an actual strap-in flight simulator, the Wii is amazingly stimulating and has the best interface ever imagined. Instead of exhausting the phalanges and tendons pushing buttons, the Wii is run by waving the controller around in the air. Not only that, but the darn thing seems to work best when you get the whole body behind the motions. Want to virtual bowl on the Wii? then practice your steps and take big, active swings with the controller. Want to score better at Tennis? then you ought to be up on your toes, paying attention to move to the next position to hit the ball on the screen. Want to box with a fictional opponent, then you better start ducking and weaving to avoid getting virtually knocked out.
The proof for me is the fairly widespread muscle soreness I have in my shoulder and back from waving the Wii's wand around. No kidding - this physical reaction is the real deal. The fact is, when you play the sports games on this thing, you get a little miniature workout. It will be very interesting to see what new action games are going to be like with this system. Its pretty clear to me that I'm going to have to start working on doing more with my left hand (and arm) in order to spread the fun and pain around a little.
So here's the final analysis: get one of these for somebody this holiday season if they 1) like gaming and 2) need more physical activity and 3) live close enough to you that you can clock some hours on it too. Its not an exercise machine, but it is a heck of a lot more fun than any exercise machine ever built and I suspect its owners won't stop using it because it's boring. It's definitely not boring. My son and I are now locked into virtual competition that is going to last for quite some time because I can actually compete with him. Rather than being a divider, this machine is giving us something to do together that's good for both of us. Wii = we. I never would have believed it.
November 29, 2006
November 12, 2006
Full speed ahead into V-Land
So now that I've had a chance to digest what I took in at VMWorld last week, I now see a much different future for IT organizations than I've seen before. The thing I like about it, is that this new vision didn't come from industry observers and pundits, but from customers who are taking sizable risks and accomplishing amazing things.
System virtualization really is the greatest thing since sliced bread and a lot of conference attendees told me so. They significantly simplify the management of their servers and applications by placing them into a consistent environment on top of VMWare ESX 3.0. Why would you want to manage lots of different physical systems, with all their quirks and personalities, when you can manage a much smaller set of servers running VMWare and providing consitent, vanilla virtual system configurations for all your applications? The answer is loud and clear - you wouldn't.
I talked to customers from Europe, Asia, South America, Canada and the US who are creating new, large server infrastructures on top of VMWare because it saves huge amounts of administrative time. I'm not joking when I say that we haven't seen a technology shift this radical since refrigeration became widespread. Once a system and application is placed in the VMWare environement it's functionality is sealed and preserved. The system hardware underneath the virtual system stack can change without impacting the performance or availability of the application. IT workers really like having control and not having to worry about new technologies screwing up the works. There is no way these people will ever go back to working the old-fashioned way.
A couple of times I heard VMWare customers at the conference say things like: "I don't care if they fire me, I'm not going to go back and make everything stupid again", or "I keep losing my best people because they can get better job offers after they learn how to do this - but its not as serious a problem as it used to be beause our virtual environment doesn't need as much attention."
One of our favorite customers, David Siles from Kane County, IL gave a presentation where he stated - among many other things - that one of the best reasons for putting applications on VMWare was to get disaster recovery protection for them that was too difficult or expensive to achieve in their native operating environments.
Wade O'Harrow, one of our SE's from the southeast was there and completely in his element as a VMWare animal. He kept describing our technology as "doing the same thing for storage as VMWare does for servers." I admit it took me awhile to figure it out, but I finally did get it. In an EqualLogic SAN, the individual storage systems are really secondary to the logical storage pools that customers create. Volumes can be moved among the underlying storage hardware resources - more or less independently of what those resources happen to be. You need disk drives for virtual storage just like you need processors for virtual servers, but each disk drive just gets less and less important in the scheme of things.
It seems weird to say that the great thing about our systems is that you don't have to depend on them individually to run your data center, but I'm getting used to this idea very rapidly as customers tell me that they don't depend on any of their servers either.
System virtualization really is the greatest thing since sliced bread and a lot of conference attendees told me so. They significantly simplify the management of their servers and applications by placing them into a consistent environment on top of VMWare ESX 3.0. Why would you want to manage lots of different physical systems, with all their quirks and personalities, when you can manage a much smaller set of servers running VMWare and providing consitent, vanilla virtual system configurations for all your applications? The answer is loud and clear - you wouldn't.
I talked to customers from Europe, Asia, South America, Canada and the US who are creating new, large server infrastructures on top of VMWare because it saves huge amounts of administrative time. I'm not joking when I say that we haven't seen a technology shift this radical since refrigeration became widespread. Once a system and application is placed in the VMWare environement it's functionality is sealed and preserved. The system hardware underneath the virtual system stack can change without impacting the performance or availability of the application. IT workers really like having control and not having to worry about new technologies screwing up the works. There is no way these people will ever go back to working the old-fashioned way.
A couple of times I heard VMWare customers at the conference say things like: "I don't care if they fire me, I'm not going to go back and make everything stupid again", or "I keep losing my best people because they can get better job offers after they learn how to do this - but its not as serious a problem as it used to be beause our virtual environment doesn't need as much attention."
One of our favorite customers, David Siles from Kane County, IL gave a presentation where he stated - among many other things - that one of the best reasons for putting applications on VMWare was to get disaster recovery protection for them that was too difficult or expensive to achieve in their native operating environments.
Wade O'Harrow, one of our SE's from the southeast was there and completely in his element as a VMWare animal. He kept describing our technology as "doing the same thing for storage as VMWare does for servers." I admit it took me awhile to figure it out, but I finally did get it. In an EqualLogic SAN, the individual storage systems are really secondary to the logical storage pools that customers create. Volumes can be moved among the underlying storage hardware resources - more or less independently of what those resources happen to be. You need disk drives for virtual storage just like you need processors for virtual servers, but each disk drive just gets less and less important in the scheme of things.
It seems weird to say that the great thing about our systems is that you don't have to depend on them individually to run your data center, but I'm getting used to this idea very rapidly as customers tell me that they don't depend on any of their servers either.
November 08, 2006
Where's the juice? VMWorld
I hate to admit it, but I've been a slacker when it comes to VMWare. I knew it was a big deal, but I never got that close to it before to do a deep dive and try to figure it out.
So after joing EqualLogic with my new mission to "Go forth and engage customers" I was directed to VMWorld in Los Angeles (Nov 6-9). I arrived in LA on a day when the temperature downtown was a record 97 degrees and I swear most of the heat was coming from the LA Convention Center where the show was.
VMWorld is a total buzz-o-rama, and I mean that in a very positive sense. This show has gathered many of the most wired people I have encountered in a long time. Now as a storage geek, I like storage shows and the other storage geeks that show up at storage shows, but I have to say that VMWorld is more amped up than any show I've been to for a long time - and almost everybody I met there that I knew said the same thing.
Our booth was gonzo. People were packed in. Some were customers coming buy to give a little love, some were Fibre Channel skeptics with "prove it" agendas, some were newbie customers with dig deeper questions and some were wired VMWare attendees just trying to drink in as much as they could. Tech talk was down and dirty into virtualized structures, app and data moves, drivers and disaster recovery scenarios. T shirts were flying off shelves and out of cabinets. It was head spinning. I haven't had a big adrenaline rush like this at a trade show - EVER. So props to the VMWare folks for making such an incredible product and building an amazing customer base.
If you are in LA and want to get together this week, let me know. 408.210.7931
mfarley@equallogic.com
So after joing EqualLogic with my new mission to "Go forth and engage customers" I was directed to VMWorld in Los Angeles (Nov 6-9). I arrived in LA on a day when the temperature downtown was a record 97 degrees and I swear most of the heat was coming from the LA Convention Center where the show was.
VMWorld is a total buzz-o-rama, and I mean that in a very positive sense. This show has gathered many of the most wired people I have encountered in a long time. Now as a storage geek, I like storage shows and the other storage geeks that show up at storage shows, but I have to say that VMWorld is more amped up than any show I've been to for a long time - and almost everybody I met there that I knew said the same thing.
Our booth was gonzo. People were packed in. Some were customers coming buy to give a little love, some were Fibre Channel skeptics with "prove it" agendas, some were newbie customers with dig deeper questions and some were wired VMWare attendees just trying to drink in as much as they could. Tech talk was down and dirty into virtualized structures, app and data moves, drivers and disaster recovery scenarios. T shirts were flying off shelves and out of cabinets. It was head spinning. I haven't had a big adrenaline rush like this at a trade show - EVER. So props to the VMWare folks for making such an incredible product and building an amazing customer base.
If you are in LA and want to get together this week, let me know. 408.210.7931
mfarley@equallogic.com
November 04, 2006
CAS: High cost and long term risk
Confusion and mystery are good things for vendors and bad things for consumers. Secret sauces are expensive. The storage industry has many examples of amazing profits borne on the back of opportunistic proprietary inventions.
The distinction between storage and data can be more difficult to ascertain than one might think. The concept of CAS (content addressable storage) is an example of how storage and data have been twisted together into a confused technology collage, creating an opportunity for vendors to print money.
At the end of the day, IT departments need to find ways to locate data. In the case of CAS, the data is placed in a special repository for historical archives and various algorithms are churned, creating resultant metadata that can be used to locate data at some later time. The belief is that preparing metadata today saves some amount of time and cost later.
Like many insurance or warranty products, CAS is paid for in advance. CAS customers pay top dollar for storage capacity that is likely going to be used very little. While there are probably some cases where customers use CAS products regularly, the question is: Couldn‚’t the same thing have been done at much lower cost? The answer to that question is obviously, yes. One could choose to use indexing, search or archive software tools, any of which could be more effective than what is integrated by the CAS vendor.
So, instead of placing archived data on expensive little-used CAS storage, it can be placed on low cost, little used storage where it is acted upon by any number of archiving, indexing or search technologies. The big advantage of separating software from hardware this way is that all the components of the archiving solution can be replaced if desired. If better software comes along, it can be easily incorporated. With a CAS system, customers are at the mercy of the hardware vendor to provide an update or upgrade.
The thing to keep in mind about archiving is that the function is expected to be needed far into the future, far past the lifespan of most technologies. The notion that any technology - storage hardware in particular - would have the ability to successfully manage the lifecycle of data archives is simply bizarre. The risk of having a data blackout in the future increases if succesful data access depends on the continued longevity of any particular vendor and any particular product sold by that vendor.
Archiving is going to be difficult work for many of us for many years, but it will be less difficult for those who don't paint themselves into corners with vendors looking for customers to milk with a string of expensive upgrades and services.
The distinction between storage and data can be more difficult to ascertain than one might think. The concept of CAS (content addressable storage) is an example of how storage and data have been twisted together into a confused technology collage, creating an opportunity for vendors to print money.
At the end of the day, IT departments need to find ways to locate data. In the case of CAS, the data is placed in a special repository for historical archives and various algorithms are churned, creating resultant metadata that can be used to locate data at some later time. The belief is that preparing metadata today saves some amount of time and cost later.
Like many insurance or warranty products, CAS is paid for in advance. CAS customers pay top dollar for storage capacity that is likely going to be used very little. While there are probably some cases where customers use CAS products regularly, the question is: Couldn‚’t the same thing have been done at much lower cost? The answer to that question is obviously, yes. One could choose to use indexing, search or archive software tools, any of which could be more effective than what is integrated by the CAS vendor.
So, instead of placing archived data on expensive little-used CAS storage, it can be placed on low cost, little used storage where it is acted upon by any number of archiving, indexing or search technologies. The big advantage of separating software from hardware this way is that all the components of the archiving solution can be replaced if desired. If better software comes along, it can be easily incorporated. With a CAS system, customers are at the mercy of the hardware vendor to provide an update or upgrade.
The thing to keep in mind about archiving is that the function is expected to be needed far into the future, far past the lifespan of most technologies. The notion that any technology - storage hardware in particular - would have the ability to successfully manage the lifecycle of data archives is simply bizarre. The risk of having a data blackout in the future increases if succesful data access depends on the continued longevity of any particular vendor and any particular product sold by that vendor.
Archiving is going to be difficult work for many of us for many years, but it will be less difficult for those who don't paint themselves into corners with vendors looking for customers to milk with a string of expensive upgrades and services.
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